Posts tagged "poverty rates"

The ranks of the poor continue to swell in the country, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last Tuesday, with more than 15 percent of Americans falling beneath the federal government’s definition of poverty last year. But it’s not just that more of us are poor. The poor, the agency found, are increasingly immiserated. What researchers... Read more »

What are you having for dinner tonight? It’s a question everybody thinks about, but not everyone has an answer to. According to the latest data from Feeding America, 16.1 percent of Chicagoans are food insecure–meaning they don’t always have access to enough food to make it through the day. Even more surprising is that many... Read more »

A bunch of states are throwing around the idea of eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit. Why do they want to get rid of it, and what is it anyway? Today, a simple primer on the credit–whom it’s for, what it does, why it works, and why it’s on the chopping block. More at chicagoreporter.com... Read more »

Every city has poverty, right? Travel around the world, and it’d be difficult to find a city that doesn’t have a ghetto or at least a “wrong side of the tracks.” They say that the poor are always with us, but they never mentioned how many there might be. This week, as we look at... Read more »

If you’ve heard complaints about Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing program, it’s probably this: a measures designed to help “blighted” neighborhoods is used to line the pockets of wealthy businessmen. But a new investigation from Bloomberg news says this kind of corruption isn’t just the Chicago way. Uncle Sam has now followed suit, shows Bloomberg, with... Read more »

Day 2 of our series on taking a look at our own neighborhoods’ census data, my boss, The Chicago Reporter’s Editor Kimbriell Kelly takes a look at where she lives. There’s a little blue dot on a map that represents every 25 black people. In my census tract of 10,538 people, there’s just one dot.... Read more »

How big of a gap is there between the life of the poorest child in America and the average one? Huge, it turns out. In fact, the United States is at the bottom of a list of 24 rich nations for child inequality–the measure of how different the lives of the poorest children are compared... Read more »

Three facts about Chicago: 1.The less money you and your neighbors make, the more calls to the child abuse hotline are made in your community. 2. The less money you and your neighbors make, the more likely you are to live among convicted sex offenders. 3. The more sex offenders you have living in your... Read more »

The Midwest has taken a beating lately. Think national poverty rates are high? Midwestern rates are eight times higher, says a Heartland Alliance analysis. Illinois isn’t an exception. In 2009, while the national unemployment rate hovered around 9.3 percent, ours hit 10.1. Over the last decade, unemployment rates in Illinois grew 129 percent. It’s probably... Read more »

You’ve heard the story of Jean Valjean, right? He’s one of the main characters in author Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables. The guy steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, gets caught and goes to prison. For most of us, that’s our basic understanding of the connection between poverty and crime.Somebody needs... Read more »